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The lands of Hepthys

Hi there!

Hereby I post this map for critique and suggestions. It's small, but it's a tiny part of a bigger (5000x4000) one that I originally did using Inkscape. It's the map of Hepthys, the northern region of the Exile. You can see the whole map in this thread.

This time I used Gimp for everything but the texts. I took the original map and imported all layers into the Gimp, and then started painting over it. It's meant as a detailed map of the region.

I'm somewhat happy with this map. I tried a few new things: drawing small miniatures for cities (Hockfrid and the Urendar sanctuary; obviously they're not drawn to scale) and using more colors. I believe they're quite common fare, but I tried them for the first time here and I enjoyed very much doing it :-)

I took a leaf from Arsheesh's tutorial "Map borders with the Gimp", though the result was not as good. Mostly, because the map is not the type that he uses in the tutorial. But anyway, the intention was just to do something so the map looked a bit less bare. I also tried to draw a compass myself, with the pathetic results that you can see there O:-) I'll do it better next time.

The compass points left for North. Why is it, you ask? Because the Exile is a patchwork world, where every region has been taken from somewhere else and fitted together by sheer godly might. So every region has its own characteristics, including North. Also every region has its own climates, even if they don't make sense in the latitude where it lies (though "latitude" doesn't make sense here: nobody said the world was round, it's a god's work). They don't seem to influence each other: south of Hepthys likes Kashef-Merra, "the Shining Desert", but the scorching hot of the crystal sands doesn't seem to placate the freezing cold of Hepthys' western region.

The result is quite cartoony, though I put a couple of textures to make it less so. I think the result is good, even if nothing compared to the works by the Great Mappers here.

Two things that came to my mind:
- Maybe some of the lines are too thick or too black. Maybe try making the coastlines dark blue and the outlines of the mountains a bit thinner? Just an idea.
- Some of the labels are nearly unreadable, especially the ones above the mountains and the bright ones on the land.

Apart from that: I love your idea of a patchwork world and the consequences of sticking unrelated regions together! Really, really cool.

Two things that came to my mind:
- Maybe some of the lines are too thick or too black. Maybe try making the coastlines dark blue and the outlines of the mountains a bit thinner? Just an idea.
- Some of the labels are nearly unreadable, especially the ones above the mountains and the bright ones on the land.

Thanks for the suggestions. The one about the thick lines will be a little tricky, because I'm not really in the mood for thinning them by hand :-) But I'll experiment with different transparency settings to see if I can improve their looks.

About the labels being unreadable: you're totally right, but that's a consequence of the drawing being too small. I wanted to put too many things there, and there's not a good way of making them all readable. I'll see what I can do by dimming their background and making the letters a bit bigger. I welcome any other suggestion about how to achieve this, of course :-)

The land of Hepthys, update 1

I've heeded Schattenherz advice and tweaked a few things here and there. Mostly I played with the transparency settings of layers and changed a couple colors. I think the result is a bit clearer, but would like to know your opinion.

I kind of liked the fat black before in that it was unique but it didn't match the other line work. This matches better.

If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)